Introduction

Since the N900 has been released many developments have been made by the community. This page is to provide a generic guide to getting started with good foundations.
This page will mainly link all the useful bits of the wiki and other useful information together.

Hardware

Hardware Accessories

Hardware Specifications

Recommended Hardware Modifications

One of the most common issues with the N900 is the surface mounted USB port.
If you are not careful with it, the port can be ripped from the PCB.
Due to the design of the port if this occurs, it can be vary difficult to repair successfully.

Therefore it is highly recommend to reinforce your USB port by soldering the casing of the USB to the PCB. Information on this is covered in great extent on talk.maemo.org

Highly Recommended Further Setup

Importance of CSSU

If you have flashed your firmware as above, your N900 will now be on the last major Nokia release (PR1.3). From here onwards the Maemo Community are providing vital security updates, fixing bugs and generally moving the device forward. This is known as CSSU or Community SSU.

It is recommended all users install CSSU, of which there are two versions.

Recommended Further Setup

Kernel Power

Kernel Power is a community developed Kernel that provides addition features and fixes to the Kernel. Kernel Power also provides the ability to overclock the device with an additional package kernel-power-settings

While overclocking is not recommended and has been known to reduce the lifetime of the device, the [Kernel Power] package on it's own is recommended and will not alter your device from the standard 250Mhz-600Mhz clock speed.

It provided important features like stable Smartreflex which will significantly increase battery life.

More information on this is here
Please note Kernel Power page is heavily biased on overclocking and is provided for further reference only.

Utilise the SD Card

The N900 has a uSD card slot, it's a good to use this as much as possible to reduce flash wear from the devices eMMC.

Many users setup there swap space(s) on the uSD card this frees up the I/O of the device.

There has been much discussion on this and applications written to help with this.

Getting Root

Common Modifications

Please note these common modifications are here for reference.
If you are a complete beginner and do not understand you must be aware that you could damage parts of your filesystem if you mess up.

Purging Unnecessary Software

Cherry

With the PR 1.2 update Nokia introduced "My Nokia" an SMS subscription service on which you receive periodic texts from Nokia.
This was automatically installed/subscribed on devices and was known to cause issues with devices sending and receiving unwanted SMS messages.

This package is one of the first to be removed by members of the community, for obvious reasons. It can be removed by:-